The Missing Cryptoqueen
What if you’re just telling me a story and I don’t know like my head is spinning. Trust me we’ll talk about it. I think... I have to do it. I should trust you. but it’s so difficult to trust you. when all this ** has happened. Did she believe that she was being recorded at that time? I think at some point, probably.
You have to be careful. Do not use email. Face-to-face or encrypted phones nothing else is safe just believe me. And then a dumb statement is made by our source, something to the effect of I'm just trying to keep these cops off my ass, basically, and then pfft, there was no goodbye or you're a scumbag or I know what you're up to.
It was just click, gone. A Bulgarian woman has been placed on the FBI's top ten most wanted list. Ruja Ignatova founded and ran one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history, peddling a fake cryptocurrency called OneCoin and raking in billions of dollars. For five years, the BBC has been investigating the missing cryptoqueen, a fraudster who stole billions.
Now there may be a breakthrough. Finally, we've got information that maybe this wasn't just a simple scam. Was she
actually involved in something much darker? Those at the heart of Ruja Ignatova’s empire and those hunting her down reveal for the first time how she may be linked to a major crime gang.
She was physically threatened. These people, they were crooks. Gangsters. And then Ruja disappeared from the face of the earth. This is real, serious, organised crime. Ruja knew too much, and she messed with the wrong guys. Can new
evidence finally solve the mystery of what happened to the world's most wanted woman? Let's give a warm applause for our founder, our lovely...
Dr. Ruja, one, two, three... applause, please. It’s really a pleasure for me to be here one and a half years after we
launched our cryptocurrency OneCoin, and we already wrote history. But this is just the beginning. Dr. Ruja Ignatova is the founder of a cryptocurrency, OneCoin. Investors pay hundreds to attend her events worldwide.
The minute she walks out, everyone's holding their cameras up, oh my goodness me, it’s Dr. Ruja in person! Because for a lot of these investors, they've never seen her before. She was real. She was actually there. This coin is going to be
number one worldwide. We will be the biggest out there. And we will write history.
I believe what makes us different is our vision. We are more than just one coin. Promising huge returns, OneCoin claimed to have more than three million investors around the world. For me to go to Wembley, it was wow, Ferraris,
Lamborghinis, expensive watches. I was like, again, it was like Hollywood. I still feel like it was a dream.
And nobody, nobody can compare to us. Ruja had this burning ambition to get rich, and she was also extremely good at playing the role of the amazing crypto CEO. We will double the coins on your accounts. When I saw Dr. Ruja Ignatova when she was talking about OneCoin, It was a hype that you invest in OneCoin, You can buy villas.
You can you can buy nice cars. She is leading people out of their financial misery. And I thank you very much for being here, sharing my vision and just making this happen. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. I met Ruja around February I thought she was incredibly successful. Ruja was a very interesting individual, very charming, very polite, very knowledgeable.
She was a very nice person to work for. I myself did not work for OneCoin. I ran Ruja's private family office in London to
invest Ruja's personal fortune. She likes the fact that she is wealthy. She liked other people to know that she was wealthy. She would always have large parties. I went to her birthday party, it was a typical Ruja party, everybody dressed to the nines, Ruja dripping in diamonds from head to toe.
She always says, Look at me. Look how successful I am. But look at my CV. I went to Oxford University. I have a PHD in international law. This was a real high flier who was always the smartest person in every room she walked into. Cryptocurrency is the future of money transactions online. The timing could not be better.
Bitcoin shows us the way, but the best is still to come. Ruja launched the OneCoin cryptocurrency during a time of
financial revolution. Cryptocurrencies, a sort of digital cash, is a sort of brand new way to be able to create and send money. Loads of excitement and hype about it. People have become millionaire overnight because the bitcoin prices, it skyrocketed and I wanted to be a part of that.
I don't want to miss another opportunity again. I actually went in opening a bank account and I use the overdraft to buy the cryptocurrency and I'm like, this must be legit. So I invested all of the money in the hope that, you know, that will
solve my financial problems because at that time I was £in debt and I was not even earning ten grand a year.
But OneCoin wasn't ever really a cryptocurrency. It had all the trappings, but that was just a ruse. What it was, was a Ponzi scheme, a very old fashioned scam and a very simple scam, which is take investment from new investors and use that investment to pay the old investors a bit of a return. And you just keep that going for as long as possible.
Always taking a percentage for yourself. And at the very top is Dr. Ruja. We are a global currency and no other cryptocurrency has as many users as we do. Ruja Ignatova and the leaders of OneCoin stole $billion from their investors. I lost all of my money and then on top of that, I had to keep borrowing money from credit card companies and the banks.
It was a really, really sad, embarrassing and depressing moment of my life. We know there are investors all over the world. But OneCoin had a, you know, Bulgarian founder. The offices were in Sofia. But what we found is that Britain played a really important role in the scam. It was about the lawyers and the PR people that allowed the scam to continue.
Rob Byrne and Jamie Bartlett are part of a BBC team investigating what is one of the biggest frauds in history. The FBI and specialist investigators from the Internal Revenue Service launched a criminal inquiry in For five years they've been investigating OneCoin and Dr. Ruja, still don't really know what the hell happened, and finally, someone from the authorities who's been investigating it from that side has actually agreed to speak to me about what really happened.
He was the main investigator. He started the whole case off. It's definitely the most interesting story I came across in years. Just unbelievable characters, they’re duping people left and right, they know how to get away with it, the FBI did a good job in helping us, and we couldn't have done it without them but IRS is the one that brings that into the U.S. Attorney's office.
When you first saw Dr. Ruja, what did you think of her? You knew you were looking at a fraudster. We knew that was all smoke and mirrors. I think it was a scam from day one. Because if you look at where all the money ended up, it ended up
in her pockets. Private jets, she had multimillion dollar mansions every one, so Dubai, London, Germany are the three main ones we knew about.
We heard about apartments filled with cash in Hong Kong and Thailand. She had a yacht that was worth several million dollars. Ruja's billionaire lifestyle of yachts and seaside mansions was funded by a complex financial network. We were able to trace billions of dollars. We were very close to that four and a half billion dollar number.
And then when you start piecing together the money trails, it just opened up Pandora's box. How’s it moving, what sort
of scale are we talking about here? What we're seeing is hundreds of millions of dollars being transferred over into shell companies. Ruja's problem is that she's getting millions and millions, billions of euros in, and she needs to somehow launder it.
She needs to turn it into money she can use, unconnected to OneCoin. So she's got this really sophisticated system of trying to launder all of the proceeds of the OneCoin investors. Ruja used her boyfriend, Gilbert Armenta, to launder OneCoin’s money. In after tracking him for a year, the US authorities saw their chance.
Gilbert had a private jet just to go back and forth to see her. We’re on the tarmac, waiting for him to come out the plane and, it's like you see in the movies He walks in, we got a warrant for your arrest. His face just drops. To his credit, he accepts responsibility. He knew his time was up. So we need him to tell us, what are you doing? Basically. Tell us everything you know about what's going on.
To help stay one step ahead of the law, Ruja had recruited a controversial figure from Luxembourg. I think if there's one person who knows what happened to Ruja, it's most likely Frank Schneider. The word spy already has quite a negative connotation because it actually means doing something a bit sleazy.
I don't know. I took a client, took the wrong client. I said yes to the wrong person. I'm not saying that I wasn't attracted by the potential financial gains. I mean, of course. Frank Schneider is a former top spy who now runs a private intelligence agency. Frank had contacts, knew how the darker side of this world actually worked, knew how spying really worked.
The way I understood Frank Schneider's role was like intelligence slash security for Ruja. They were very, very close. Frank was very protective of Ruja. Ruja seemed very protective of Frank. Ruja was very brilliant, extremely smart. But her success was accompanied by all sorts of problems, specifically her boyfriend, Gilbert.
We found out pretty much at the beginning that Gilbert was a problem. She would have wanted to definitely know absolutely everything about him. Ruja had been tipped off that her lover, Gilbert Armenta, had been arrested. She was
warned he might talk. Frank or Ruja bought the townhouse above Gilbert to specifically have spies in there listening in on what Gilbert was doing.
This was a very sophisticated woman. This was not your run of the mill, white collar criminal. So we get all these phone calls that Ruja has been secretly recording of her talking to her boyfriend, Gilbert Armenta. Hello. Hey wait a second let
me switch off the thing. Ah how are you baby? I’m good. Yeah? Just worried about you.
I miss you so much. But Gilbert Armenta is working with the FBI and the IRS recording calls, too, to try to get information out of Ruja. This is not like a three or four phone call conversation. This is over a period of several weeks and you're just listening to the conversation as it's happening.
Yeah aout the trust and the paranoia issue of course we can stop trusting people we can just be me myself and I whatever but on the other hand you know it makes life also very limited and very difficult. Some things I don’t trust you at all like I’ll not lie to you. I think I... I have to do it. So it all feels like a bit of a game where they're trying to suss each other out.
Sorry to say this I should trust you but it’s so difficult to trust you when all this ** has happened. I agree I agree. I would not like to agree with you but yes you’re right. It doesn't seem like something that happens in real life. She, spying on you and you were spying on her. We were all thinking, this is going to be a movie someday, this is going to be a movie.
Because, just... the things you heard are just unbelievable. Might be like you say it might not be Gilbert. What if you’re
just telling me a story and I don’t know like my head is spinning. Ruja knew that she was under threat by the United States. She also found out from her own sources that Gilbert Armenta, her lover, was actually an informant and he was an instrument of the U.S.
to grab her and get her to the U.S. and she wanted to turn this around and get him and grab him and use her contacts to end him up in some miserable situation in Bulgaria. Trust between us currently is not there. You lied to me on so many things on a personal level. I think at this point we can see that Ruja was pretty paranoid and rightly so.
By police forces from ten different countries were investigating OneCoin for fraud. According to Europol documents
handed to the BBC. So we got these documents from Europol meetings that were about Operation Satellite, which was the coordinated investigation into OneCoin and Ruja. It's believed these police documents were also leaked to Ruja Ignatova.
She was informed by her network and her sources from Bulgaria as fast as with live coverage. Ruja had good connections in Bulgaria to the intelligence service, they were to the prosecutor's office, they were to the police. We knew early on she had ears all over the place, even in some law enforcement.
She had ears and knew that she was being looked at so we got to be careful. You have to be *** careful do not use email face-to-face or encrypted phones nothing else is safe just beleive me. I think we’re going to be OK. During one phone call with Ruja in October Gilbert Armenta let slip he was secretly working for the Americans.
It was a slip of the tongue. It was definitely a slip of the tongue. He went off script, something to the effect of I'm just
trying to keep these cops off my ass, basically. And then, there was no goodbye or you're a scumbag or I know what you're up to. It was just click, gone. There's not a trace.
She put the phone down. She never answered another call. She never communicated with any of these people? Nothing. You never heard a voice again? Nope. That was it. After Gilbert confirmed the authorities were closing in, Ruja
acted immediately. My relationship with OneCoin and with Ruja ended brutally on the th of October when from that day onwards, Ruja was no longer to be seen and disappeared from the face of the earth.
The last time anyone's ever seen Ruja, she gets on a very early Ryanair flight from Sofia Airport, traveling to Athens with
a bodyguard, disembarks the plane, tells a bodyguard to go back to Bulgaria and leaves her there. She'd been met in Greece, and got into the back of a Porsche with about three big, burly men.
And that was the last anybody’s ever seen of her. I was desperate to find out where Ruja was. I was emailing her every
day, I wanted to know that she was safe and well. I was texting her constantly saying, Ruja, where are you? Where are you? We need you. She never got back to me. Within a week, I had the two lawyers sitting in my office and we’d hired a
private investigator to find her.
They said that there's no trace of her. The question's always been, is she running from investors? Is she running from the authorities? In my mind, there's no doubt she was running from US authorities. Since Ruja's disappearance, more than people have been arrested for their part in the OneCoin scam.
And like Gilbert Armenta, some have been convicted of financial crimes. Ruja's former spy chief Frank Schneider is accused of fraud and money laundering and now faces extradition to the U.S. Every day is kind of the same. I'm lucky I have a large place, but it is still prison. I can't leave, I can’t go shopping I can't do anything.
I am under total house arrest. They are threatening me with years of prison. I mean, given the forces arrayed against you,
have you ever thought about running? No. That's just not an option. I mean, where do you run here in this world? You know, it's... How on earth would I... no. The fact that he was potentially facing the rest of his life in jail in America, so he was backed into a corner, I suppose he felt, then it was in his best interests to speak to us.
But he was allegedly involved in the fraud. And you can only deduce he knows a hell of a lot more than he told us. But while under house arrest, Frank Schneider did provide the BBC with documents detailing OneCoin finances. Frank Schneider gave us a load of documents that were pretty significant. We had internal documents which showed transactions worth millions and millions of dollars.
And if you look at who's behind those companies, a very, some very shady individuals. This has to do with purely serious money trafficking. OneCoin wasn't just laundering victims’ stolen money. It was handling funds from a wide range of shell companies. Some in Britain. So some of the British companies that were used to invest in OneCoin were tied to some pretty serious criminals, particularly moving money out of Russia and Ukraine.
For example we see that there's an entity that was tied to the former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, who, you
know, fled the country and allegedly stole billions of dollars. Another of the companies is tied to a Ukrainian arms dealer. He's been involved in the smuggling of weapons from North Korea to Iran.
Because of these connections that we've established between Ruja and other criminals, it's really got us wondering, is there much more to the story than we first thought? There'd always been some rumours that Ruja was involved in... sort
of criminal groups, but no one ever really could say. No one ever really knew.
But then Frank told us that Ruja really was sort of tightly embedded within all these organised crime groups. This happened in Dubai. She was threatened more or less physically, or at least there was a threat of a physical threat. She was approached by British lads who sat next to her at a cafe and then indicated that she would get a request and that
she'd better follow that request.
Otherwise there'd be consequences. This was a sort of a blackmail and extortion payment of several tens of millions of dollars. Otherwise, there would be safety issues for her and her family. They were... crooks. Gangsters. But who?
Because you said you’d identify them. Yes. No, I'm not going to tell you who, because I have a family and I have kids and I have a wife.
And security reasons, too. So I know, this is real serious organised crime. The BBC believes it can identify the man who is said to have blackmailed Ruja Ignatova. And that person is Gary Murphy, a pretty big time British gangster. So Gary Murphy is a convicted drug smuggler from Liverpool. This is a man who is quite feared, someone who knows how the
criminal underworld operates.
So the curious thing is it looks like Gary Murphy first got involved through some kind of bizarre extortion attempt, but then later was working for OneCoin. But it seems like an odd way to enter that world. UK court documents reveal that Gary Murphy went on to work as an enforcer for OneCoin. What is clear is that Gary Murphy was involved in different
aspects of the fraud.
Things like protection, things like pursuing debts. Mr. Hampton, that trip to McDonald's on your way to work yesterday is really not good for your health. That means that someone was following me. They got pictures of me in a service station with my wife getting coffee. It was terrifying knowing that someone was tailing us.
It became worse when the police told us to get protection. Christopher Hamilton is a British businessman. He's been accused by the U.S. of laundering $million for Ruja’s boyfriend, Gilbert Armenta. Charges Hamilton denies. But Christopher Hamilton is accused by OneCoin of having tried to steal their money.
One day he starts getting these mysterious messages saying, Hello, Mr. Hamilton, we need that money back. It's so creepy isn’t it, to have pictures-- We go on this... This is the Mmotorway and the service station and that's not even by
your house. No, it’s miles away from my home. So someone's keeping tabs with you all the way to be taking photographs of a U.S.
service station. It is quite chilling. So we've been able to establish that Gary Murphy was orchestrating this extortion
attempt on Christopher Hamilton for OneCoin. If this is not completed, matters are going to take a turn for the worse. I
assure you. And then there's pictures of your family as well.
And then you see a picture of your grandkids. What we're talking about really is OneCoin, sending some organised criminal to sort of monitor you, watch you and send you these threatening messages. The leaked Europol documents
also link Ruja and OneCoin to another alleged organised crime figure. There's this mysterious name that keeps popping
up all over the place.
Rumours online. He has all of these sort of strange connections to OneCoin and to Ruja. And it's so confusing as to who this man really is. His name is just Taki. His nickname is the Bulgarian cocaine King. Taki, he came up more than once. It
wasn't like it was a one off. That was a recurring theme.
That name? -Yeah. -just kept popping up. Yep. He was the head of whatever this drug organisation was. Better known as Taki, Hristoforos Amanatidis is widely suspected of being a Bulgarian organised crime boss. But multiple police investigations for murder, armed robbery and drug trafficking have never led to a prosecution.
Taki’s a mysterious figure. At one stage, Interpol were after him on drug related charges. But that Interpol red notice, we understand, is no longer active. So no one's ever really nailed him for anything. But he's certainly feared. And I'm thinking, why is this Taki character involved with OneCoin? Say, when you Google Hristoforos Nicos Amanatidis AKA Taki, you get some quite strange results.
Mainly blogs that are just full of nonsense, quite frankly. I'd say the most eye catching one is probably about his and his wife's joy that the great British Bake Off is returning to screens. It's great to see classic recipes such as the Victoria Sponge being revived and embraced by a new generation of bakers.
It's not to say that you can't be, you know, an alleged international drug smuggler and also love the Great British Bake
Off at the same time, that is possible. To me, my best guess is this is just a fake blog. Someone's been paid to put it out there. So the truth about him is it’s just that little bit harder for people to find.
We showed photographs of him to individuals that knew Ruja, were around her, perhaps identify him. I am % certain that I met that guy on a number of occasions. And he was one of her bodyguards. Well, the FBI do refer to an international drug smuggler who is in charge of Ruja’s security. And our understanding is that that is Taki.
We were told an allegedly big time drug guy provides her physical security. Was he a bodyguard? No, No. His people would have been the bodyguards. Why would a suspected big time drugs guy be providing the physical security for a woman in Bulgaria? Here, I'll give you security if you launder my money. So, you know, she's well-protected.
One source close to Ruja told the BBC she may have paid Taki up to €a month for protection. As in most, let’s call
them mafia environments, you have to buy yourself protection. Like in the classic kind of Chicago movie. You have to buy yourself protection and the bigger it gets, the more dangerous it becomes.
Listen I have done many many investigations but the most dangerous investigation in my professional story is the Ruja investigation. Journalist Dimitar Stoyanov has been investigating Ruja's relationship with the Bulgarian underworld and is now working alongside the BBC. The investigation is dangeous because a lot of people want to bury the truth.
I think Ruja is a product of Taki’s organisation and he played a key role in her life according to the evidence. Bulgaria is completely seized by organised crime and the situation is dire. Since becoming an investigative journalist I’ve been assaulted more than ten times and I’ve had to leave the country at least four times Dimitar can't prove Taki's
involvement in organised crime, but through his gangland sources, he's convinced Taki's a big player with close connections to Ruja.
Right now Taki is the “capo di tutti icapi’ he’s the head of the mafia. Taki is powerful enough to help anyone who
wants to hide or disappear. From what I’ve heard he was really close to her. So there are a lot of unanswered questions when it comes to Ruja and Taki's relationship. People say they were very close, for example, that he was the godfather of her daughter.
The Christening of her daughter was a three day extravaganza. On day one, it was going to be a party on Ruja’s yacht, going around the Black Sea. Day two was the Christening itself and Ruja's daughter was Christened on an island just off the coast. The Europol police documents and Bulgarian property records also reveal financial connections between Ruja
and members of Taki's family.
Ruja does a really mysterious property deal with Taki's partner, where she buys a piece of land for nothing, sells it to Ruja for millions of dollars. And even Taki's brother in law, he also runs a company that has all of these connections to OneCoin. So there seems to be a financial relationship.
Is it Ruja that's helping Taki getting protection? Is it the fact that she's helping him move money? Clearly, there's something mutually beneficial going on here. So Taki just seems to grow and grow and grow in this story. We don't know
how Taki and Ruja met or whether he was involved with OneCoin from the start.
Taki is a ghost. You'll never see him. You only hear of him. You'll never talk to him. He's talking to you, through other people. You cannot deliver a message. You'll get messages if you don't listen, you disappear. You are either removed from office or you just disappear from Earth. While a government minister, Ivan Hristanov investigated allegations that
Taki oversaw a significant criminal network sanctioned by corrupt officials.
So when we talk about Taki, Taki is the head of the mafia in Bulgaria. He's extremely powerful. The state, the political establishment and the mafia became one and the same thing. It became one body. With Bulgaria one of the most corrupt countries in Europe, Many experts claim its mafia has a strong hold on the political elite.
After I started fighting with Taki, I was scared even to get home and every time I would be like, you know, just trying to
see if there is somebody hiding behind the corridor. It's obvious that the Bulgarian agencies worked for this couple, Ruja and Taki. The only person who can protect her physically, but most importantly, protect her from all those investigations, including from foreign agencies.
It was Taki. Five years after Ruja Ignatova disappeared, the FBI turned to the public for help. Today we are announcing Ruja Ignatova, an international fugitive who allegedly masterminded a vast worldwide fraud scheme, is being added to the FBI's top ten most wanted list. Ruja Ignatova, who became known as the missing Crypto Queen, has been accused of defrauding victims out of more than $billion.
Why is she on that list? I mean, with the biggest criminals in the world, I mean, Osama bin Laden has been on that list. Is
it because of a scam, a big scam or is it because of the people she's associated with? The big time criminals, the darker world that maybe she's actually part of. Ignatova was always worried about law enforcement and did the best she could to avoid detection.
So starting today, we're offering a $reward for information that leads to her arrest. There’s like this global manhunt now for this woman, and they get in touch with me saying I've seen her in a bar in Athens. I've seen her in a restaurant, it’s definitely her. She's been sighted on a British Virgin Islands hotel she's on a yacht somewhere floating around the Mediterranean we've seen her in a beach bar and every single sighting turns out to be not her.
Is the FBI still receiving tip offs and leads? I know of two that we acted on, but they turned out to be nothing. One
completely off the wall, one somewhat credible. Follow it up. Nothing. Was just another bad lead. Nobody knows where she is. That's the whole lore to this thing this is like a white collar crime combined with what you would think El Chapo or somebody like that would do on steroids.
Even some of the biggest drug lords in the world can't hide from the authorities forever. We have no clue where she's at. One of the last people to speak to Ruja before her disappearance was her intelligence chief, Frank Schneider. I said, why
do you have to leave? You are safe in Bulgaria. Nothing will happen to you in Bulgaria.
You are, you are protected. Why do you want to leave Bulgaria? And she said, I have to. There will be a police raid and my people want me out of the country. I have to do this. I don't have any choice. The very fact that the FBI can only say that she landed in Greece and we have no idea where she went after that point shows that there was serious planning.
It was executed to perfection. I know there was an exit strategy to at least Greece. You can't pull that off on a moment's notice. That has to be in place. Who is the person that you think would know about that exit strategy? If I were a betting man, I think that person would be Frank Schneider. From early on in the story A lot of people describe Frank Schneider
as the man behind the curtain, The Wizard of Oz.
I didn't trust Frank. He's a spy. He's skilled in deception. Law enforcement agencies could come and find me, but I couldn't tell them where she was because I don't know where she is. Let's say she lives the high life on some yacht in the Mediterranean. It is difficult to do that on such a profile.
She is not the type that will live in the jungle and hunt for food. The five star life that she that she had before that lifestyle does not go with disappearing. So I have a theory or a hypothesis that she no longer lives. It is so difficult to actually disappear without a trace for so many years. What if Dr.
Ruja is actually dead? I mean, it's possible. And if she's involved with all these serious, organised criminals and who
knows exactly what she's been up to, there are probably a lot of people that would want her gone. Whatever happened to Ruja whether she went to soem exotic destination or was killed Taki probably had something to do with it.
One criminal associate of Taki’s, known as Kuro, claimed to have information about Ruja's disappearance. Kuro told me he heard Taki discuss his criminal business in front of Ruja. Kuro asked Taki why did you talk in front of Ruja? Taki answered don’t worry she’s as good as dead. She disapperaed three or four days later.
Kuro had also obtained a secret police report and handed it to Dimitar. It alleged that Taki’s Brother in law had been
overheard discussing Ruja. According to the report the brother-in-law was drunk and also dstraught when he said that Ruja Ignatova had been killed on a yacht in the Ionian sea. According to the document, he said that Taki had had Ruja murdered.
Ruja was killed on a yacht off Greece. Her body was dismembered and chucked in the sea. I mean, if it's true and it was Taki that in fact, ordered Ruja’s murder, it's horrific no matter what she did. And it really would change the complexion
of the story because the person who defrauded investors out of billions, potentially herself has become a victim.
The key question is why would Taki kill her. Well, one possible answer is that she already knew too much. If in the Mafia you become a liability you're butchered and you're thrown to sink at the bottom of the sea. And knowing how violent cartels are, if he thought she was a threat to him and he had access to her, %, I would, he would probably take her out.
But do I know that? No. But that would make sense. If she's dead, I have to believe it's somebody close to her who knew where her funds or knew how to access her funds or where they were one of the two. While the billions Ruja Ignatova
stole have not been recovered, property records and eyewitnesses suggest Taki’s associates are now living in her Bulgarian mansions.
Many of the properties that belonged to Ruja are curretly being used by people connected to Taki. No body no crime unfortunately. I can’t be sure that Taki is responsible. for Ruja’s murder but I think it is a very very possible version because the moment we got it and the people in it found out we became the target of threats and surveillance.
After publishing evidence Taki had ordered Ruja's murder sometime around death threats again forced Dimitar into
hiding. I think Taki is a very dangerous man I try not to be afraid but in fact I have reason to be afraid. A lot of people are very fearful. They know that something terrifying and horrific has happened in their neighborhood.
Dimitar’s source Kuro gave evidence to the CIA that Taki had ordered Ruja's murder according to witnesses questioned by the BBC. After the information leaked, Kuro was assassinated while living in South Africa. Developments in the murder of four Bulgarians in the leafy suburb of Constantia, a couple, their housekeeper and a bodyguard were found with gunshot wounds to their heads.
Kurowas killed in a brutal way. His home was broken into in Cape Town in South Africa, and he was killed execution style, along with his wife and the people who worked for him. Certain people had to be removed because they knew too much about Taki. It was the kind of public execution that looked more like a statement.
Be careful who you deal with. Within the last year, two other high profile criminals in Bulgaria have been murdered and another has disappeared. Hello, Dimitar what's happened? What's the new news? There has been another shooting in Bulgaria. Someone has been murdered in the street. Dimitar’s saying that another gangster is walking around in Sofia.
and what sounds like an assassin from meters away is just being able to... has shot him in the head. But what's scary is the thought that you could just be walking down the street and just suddenly just get shot in the head. Thanks Dimitar, bye. Bye bye. People just getting killed all the time in Bulgaria.
I don't even know how deep this all goes, so I don't even know quite how powerful these people really are and what lengths they would go to to stop someone exposing them. While experts believe these murders point to an ongoing feud in the Bulgarian underworld, there is no direct evidence linking them to Taki.
So there is a line of executions it is pretty obvious for us there is a massive cleanup operation in this mafia organised crime ecosystem. It's difficult to know if any of this has got to do with Ruja or not. It is very brave to say that this clean up
operation is because of Ruja. It is very likely that actually Ruja is part of the cleanup operation.
One of the people on top of the list to get removed. Taki has never been arrested over claims he had Ruja Ignatova murdered. Bulgarian police say they don't have enough evidence. The BBC has uncovered the sudden death of yet another criminal connected to OneCoin. Gary Murphy was involved in a quad bike accident.
He went off the side of a cliff like a lot of people in this story, not a good way to go. The one thing that is clear from the story is that people are either ending up in jail, they're ending up dead, or they're disappearing. And in a further twist,
just months after our interview, Ruja's spy chief himself joined the list.
I get a call from someone saying Frank Schneider has disappeared. What do you mean he disappeared? He's gone, what, has he been extradited to the US? No, he's vanished. He's gone on the run. Ruja’s Mr. Fixer has done exactly the same thing as his old boss. He just disappeared into thin air. Ruja Ignatova remains the world's most wanted woman, and the FBI is still looking for her.
In the years after she’s said to have been murdered, there have been several reported sightings. There was even a police
raid in Greece, but still nothing. No body has ever been found. Whether Ruja is dead or not, it's very hard to be sure about this. It could be, this is just another brilliant maneuver to throw everyone off the scent.
And I wouldn't put it past her to do that. But it's more and more likely that actually she's dead. We're chasing a shadow. At some point, it becomes like, Elvis Presley might be still alive. Ruja might be still alive on some distant island, too, with young boys around her. It's not really very likely.
She messed with the wrong guys.
Upvoted! Thank you for supporting witness @jswit.